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Tweaking Websites

WordPress functions to supercharge your Theme!Yesterday

WordPress is well known for its plugins and themes, but not enough people know and love what you can do in your themes functions.php. Chris Pearson showed his love for them back in May, and he did a great job of explaining how you can bring your own functions.php file to each and every theme you use, so I'm not going to repeat that, just go read it.

Then Matt Varone started releasing a whole array of useful functions in three consecutive posts over the last couple of months:

1. Taking Advantage of Functions.php in Wordpress Themes
2. Useful custom functions for WordPress
3. is_subpage() - Custom Conditional Function

So I thought it was about time I started doing the same and started sharing a few of the custom functions & hacks I'm using in my functions.php.

Useful hacks

I'll start with the hacks, basically all of them have to do with disabling default functionality in WordPress that annoyed me. The first free are to

Disabling the update nagNovember 26

WordPress' core update nag is quite the useful thing, I'll usually know before it shows that there's an update, but a lot of people won't. If you don't know what I mean with core update nag, it's this thing:

The issue is that this thing doesn't only show to you, it shows to all users of your blog. Now there's a plugin that will disable this for you, but it will disable it for everyone, yourself included.

A better thing to do, in my humble opinion, is either edit that plugin to have the following code, or add this code to your themes functions.php:

if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_users' ) ) { add_action( 'init', create_function( '$a', "remove_action( 'init', 'wp_version_check' );" ), 2 ); add_filter( 'pre_option_update_core', create_function( '$a', "return null;" ) ); }

This will sho

TwitterCounter: the API and the Mint PepperNovember 25

As you know I'm a big fan of TwitterCounter, and Boris, its creator and founder is one of the few Dutch entrepreneurs I'm actually a fan of, as he really seems to get the "new" web.

I emailed him last week, asking why TwitterCounter didn't have an API, and we started talking about what an API should do. He started developing it, showed me some code, and then I offered him to develop the API myself. So I did, resulting in this API.

On top of that API Sean Hammons already implemented a pane for getClicky, and I myself created a Pepper for Mint. It looks like this:

Like it? Download it here

This is a post from

Disabling SearchWikiNovember 23

Google introduced Search Wiki, and opted me in without a method of disabling it. Thanks a lot Google. Not.

So I started searching for a way to disable. First I found this post , via Saad Kamal, on Google Operating System, but that didn't work to well for me. This greasemonkey based solution is a tad bit better, but still only disables the CSS, it doesn't remove the functionality, just hides it.

Then I stumbled upon this thread.

That thread told me to add hl=all to the query string, and that would indeed disable SearchWiki, at least for now. So I've immediately created a new instance of my Google Disable Personalized Search plugin, which will disable SearchWiki as well.

If you already have the previous version of that search plugin installed, do the following in Firefox:

• click on the favicon next to the search box, and see the following appear:
  
  

Technorati Pepper for MintNovember 18

I've been playing with the thought of developing a Pepper for Mint for ages, but never got to it. Tonight I decided to do it, and it turned out to be incredibly easy!

So I've developed a Pepper that has two panes, one displays your Technorati scores like this:

The other displays the latest links Technorati has found for your blog, like this:

I used the Duck Soup Technorati API library to do this, and have to say it's very easy to use.

Download it here.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. Want to make sure you're trying just as hard or harder as your competitors to rank in the search engines? Use this website auditing tool and you'll know!

Technorati Pepper for Mint